My seven-year-old
daughter had to do an oral poster presentation on a famous American. She choseHelen Keller, a choice guided in large part by me, always anxious to counter
thesocial perspectives of disability as weakness and everyday things as
miraculous already bombarding impressionable young minds in the first grade.

There is a girl
with a disability I will call "Mary" in my daughter's class. Well,
Mary is sort of in my daughter's class, which is to say Mary sometimes appears
for lunchtime and special activities such as birthdays or field trips. When
Mary does come to the classroom, she sits passively at her almost-always-empty
desk with "Mary" printed at the top in large letters. Her name
proclaims the truth of what is not apparent - that Mary is indeed a member of
Room One. Mary is always accompanied by, or rather tethered to, a classroom
aide. The aide's sole purpose seems to be to keep Mary from participating.

Case in point. I
brought my hearing dog into the classroom to give my annual talk about
"working dogs help people with disabilities and by the way people with
disabilities are just like you." As expected, Mary was there, and as
expected, she was sitting in the back of the room where she was least likely to
cause a disturbance, or rather most likely to cause a disturbance because she
couldn't hear what I was saying or see the pictures in the brightly illustrated
children's book I was reading about "My Buddy the Service Dog."

Cover of book "My Buddy" picturing a boy in a wheelchair with Golden Retriever by his side.

After the story
and a handful of eager questions from my audience such as, "What happens
when Buddy has to go to the bathroom?" I sat with my dog while the
children came up one by one to pet him. At last it was Mary's turn, and the
aide manhandled her to the front of the room while Mary, not surprisingly given
that her hand was being given as an offering to a large furry animal with sharp
white teeth, was resisting. "No, no," wailed Mary, pulling away as
the aide stood behind her, blocking her exit and shoving her towards me.
"Hey," I said, "Let her go. She doesn't have to pet the dog.
Step away aide! Mary can come on her own if she wants to."

The aide was in
such shock she actually did what I said. She stepped back, ready to pounce on
Mary if necessary, but releasing her arm from the death grip.

Mary got the most
wonderful expression on her face. She stood there, surrounded by empty space,
free, for a split second, to decide. And of course, as I had expected, she
decided to come forward. She reached out her arm and she patted my dog, and
then she gave me a great big smile, full of light, full of understanding. And
then she was sucked back into the grip of the person meant to enable her.

But I was talking
of Helen Keller, and my daughter's poster presentation. The assignment was to
paste photos of the famous person on a large sheet of paper, along with
captions describing why they were important. We had prepared for this
assignment by reading from a biography of Helen and, since the biography was a
little dry for a seven-year-old, watching a DVD of "The Miracle
Worker."

"What did you
learn about Helen from watching the movie?" I prompted.

"She was
deaf-blind."

"Okay, that's
right, and what else?"

"She slapped
people."

"What?"

"She slapped
people. She knocked her teacher's tooth out. It was so funny!"

My first reaction
was, "You can't put that in your report, that she slapped people! Surely
there is something nicer than that you can say about Helen Keller!" So we
wrote that Helen traveled a lot, and she was friends with Alexander Graham
Bell, and she met Presidents, and she showed the world that deaf-blind people
can do anything. I was incensed that Helen was always portrayed as a Savage who
was rescued from darkness by the Savior, Annie Sullivan. Isn't that just the
way of society, I fumed, idolizing someone because they became normal against
the odds?

And that made me
rethink my reaction to, "Helen Keller slapped people." What was
slapping people but exerting her own sense of self, her right to want a doll,
and to want it now. She was
expressing her resistance against doing what she was told, doing what she did
not understand. If Helen slapped Annie, it was because she was self-determined,
because she had a sense of her own person as distinct from others and of
herself as exerting control over her world. In bringing Helen "into the
light" the essence of that self-determination was lost, at the expense of
being able to express herself in a way that was acceptable to others.

One of the great
conversations, if you will, about Helen Keller was her relationship with Annie.
Because Helen relied on Annie for just about everything, the question arose of
"who was Helen and who was Annie?" What of what Helen said was from
Helen, and what was from Annie? My personal opinion is "what does it
matter?" Together, they were two remarkable women. Apart from each other
they were remarkable too. That was Helen the author, socialist, traveler,
actor, dancer, speaker, thinker. But was she self-determined? Did she ever slap
someone after she figured out that "water" was the stuff coming out
of the well in the backyard? Not likely, because the mission of Annie, of
Helen's parents, of the Perkins School for the Blind, of society, and of Helen
herself, was for Helen to behave as if she were normal. That behavior involved
giving herself over to the unseen hand of decorum. What part did "no"
play in that equation?

Later that night,
after my daughter was asleep, I took out the poster and wrote, "Helen
slapped people," in small print, perhaps where the teacher would not see
it, at the bottom of the page.

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